Fellowships, Studentships and Workshops

Fellowships

The Stephan Weiland Fellowship 2007 call is now closed, and they have been awarded to Inge Wouters, from Partner 11, who will undertake her fellowship at Imperial College London (Partner 1), and Bertrand Sudre, from Partner 19, who will be going to the University of Basel (Partner 8). Full details of their programmes of work will be uploaded here soon.

The first two GABRIEL Fellowships have now been awarded and undertaken. The successful applicants were Maria Vasilieva, from SSMU and Giovanni Malerba from the University of Verona. Dr Malerba will send a report when the fellowship is completed.

Maria Vasilieva
Maria Vasilyeva has now completed her fellowship and below is the transcript of her report.

IMMUNE MECHANISMS OF OPISTORCHIS FELINEUS INFECTION AND ITS RELATION TO ATOPY

Introduction and background

Maria Vasilyeva is a medical doctor (2001) with a specialization in Allergy and Immunology (2003) and PhD in Oncology and Immunology (2006). She has a 5 years experience of practical work as an allergist-immunologist and also she has an experience of same laboratory methods (induced sputum assay, ELISA). Maria is a researcher for Central Research Laboratory of Siberian State Medical University (partner 29: SSMU). Her present research is focused on the immune mechanisms of opisthorchis infection and its relation to atopy.

Opisthorchis felineus helminth infection is very common in Tomsk region (West Siberia, Russian Federation) and it appears to influence atopic disease prevalence in this region. Infectious background in conjunction with urban European-like and typical rural lifestyle give very good models of natural relationships between infectious and atopic diseases which are one of the major issues in the GABRIEL project. Immune mechanisms of opisthorchis infection and its relation to atopy in urban and rural areas in Tomsk region will be studied in the project of Siberian State Medical University (SSMU, Tomsk, Russia) in junction with the Department of Parasitology of Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC, Leiden, Netherlands).

During Maria’s GABRIEL Fellowship in Netherlands she was based at Parasitology Department of Leiden University Medical Center under the supervision of Professor Maria Yazdanbakhsh. She has got 3-mounth training in cellular and molecular immunological techniques appropriate for the analysis of cell proliferation activity and immune system associated genes expression to be able to use these methods for the project realizing at the basis of Central Research Laboratory of Siberian State Medical University.

Fellowship activities description

A. Theoretical training.
• Immunology Review Club attendance.
• Journal Club attendance.
• Work discussion attendance.
• Reading material.

B. Laboratory techniques training.
• Procedure for whole blood assay and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) isolation.
• Whole blood and PBMC stimulation with bacterial antigens.
• PBMC cryopreservation and supernatant storage.
• The measurement of cytokines by ELISA and by Luminex methods.
• Cytoflowmetry methods for intercellular staining and surface staining of immune cells (FACS analysis).
• mRNA extraction from whole blood and PBMC.
• cDNA synthesis from mRNA.
• qPCR method.

C. A specified short project aimed to compare whole blood and PBMC TLR ligands tolerance induction. This part of the training involved totally independent setting up of the project, data generation, data analysis and presentation.

Conclusions

The immuno-epidemiological project of Siberian State Medical University (SSMU, Tomsk, Russia) in junction with the Department of Parasitology of Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC, Leiden, Netherlands) will be carried out in an area with a special epidemiology of allergic disorders and Opistorchis felineus infection. Maria Vasilyeva had a 3-mounth GABRIEL Fellowship for the training in cellular and molecular immunological techniques appropriate for the analysis of cell proliferation activity and immune system associated genes expression. After training she will use these methods for the project realizing at the Central Research Laboratory of Siberian State Medical University.

Giovanni Malerba
Giovanni is a Biologist (1996) with a specialization in Medical Genetics (2000) and PhD in biotechnologies applied to Biomedical Sciences (2006). He is actually involved in studying the genetic component of complex diseases (asthma, cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis). The genetics of asthma represents the main area of his study. He was also the webmaster of the Italian Society of Human Genetics website from 2002 to 2006. His interests, that span biology, human genetics, statistics and computer science, are devoted to the use, implementation and development of methods that can help in dissecting the genetic component of complex diseases.

The Project
Three samples of asthmatic families (Italy, UK, France) have been independently studied to identify chromosomes that are likely linked to asthma or asthma-related phenotypes. The families have been genotyped with the same genetic markers and might be now arranged together to perform a linkage analysis on the whole sample set. The project consists in setting up a common database for the three sample sets and performing the statistical analyses to investigate the linkage with asthma or asthma-related traits under the exploratory hypothesis of imprinting, genetic heterogeneity or interaction between chromosomal regions. This project will allow for strengthening evidence for linkage regions of importance, that may then be further explored by linkage disequilibrium mapping towards gene identification.

Meanwhile, GABRIEL is running an ongoing programme of workshops, details of which will be posted regularly on the website. Please follow the link below for more information.

Workshop information

Workshop timetable